The perks and drawbacks of being a masked figure are roughly the same: nobody can know you. While this anonymity frees graffiti artists like GATS (Graffiti Against the System), it also means the painter has had to connect with their audience beyond a personal identity. Over decades of painting city walls, warehouses, underpasses, and highways worldwide, GATS has built a community that instantly recognizes the bearded or toothed mask as…
Lots going on in London right now, and in mural news, Shepard Fairey teamed with Migrate Art to create a new work, Rise Above Earth Justice, painted at Anlaby House, Boundary Street, Shoreditch. The project was funded by the Ford Foundation with the support of Ambassador Jane Hartley of the U.S. Embassy in London, and produced by Migrate Art, Charlotte Pyatt and Simon Butler.
One of the greatest contributions to the art lexicon is treating street art as an active tool in understanding how we use and view public space. It has always been insufficient to simply label it as “street art” or “graffiti” and neglect the broader context in which it can be appreciated on both micro and macro levels. Nuart and the Nuart Festival, alongside curator Martyn Reed from his home base…
No doubt, there are a lot of mural festivals; in fact, too many, if you ask me. When the senior center starts taking field trips to see cool new graffiti on the walls of your town’s “old town,” the coolness factor of the mural festival has lost much of its… coolness. With the idea generally being to shine a light on your city via large scale art, once a few…
Right from the jump; it’s all here. FUTURA 2000, the Bronx, graffiti, street culture, 50 years of art history…, like there are few art forms, and an artist for that matter, that represent a particular era (and the transcendence of said era to move through the years) quite like FUTURA. He and graffiti go together, even though FUTURA didn’t linger in graff for too long. He took the freedom, the…
It’s been 150 years since Impressionism transformed our world and how we perceive it. On April 15, 1874, a collective of upstarts including Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot and Paul Cézanne converged on the Paris studio of photographer Félix Nadar for a group show that art critic Louis Leroy sardonically dubbed “The Exhibition of the Impressionists” — a jab at Monet’s “Impression: soleil levant,” the painter’s dreamlike…
Hey, we were right to call it Banksy’s London Street Zoo all along. After 8 days of painting around London with different stenciled animals, today, Day 9, sees Banksy head to the London Zoo to paint a gorilla letting the animals out of confinement. If this is the last day of the Street Zoo, it has actually been a nice distraction during the doldrums of summer art activity, a good…
Are we having fun? At the artist Banksy’s suggestion, we are having a little fun as go across the English capital (or UK capital if you want, it is, indeed, the capital of both) in Banksy’s London Street Zoo. The rhino, cleverly placed atop an old car, is on Westmoor Street in Charlton, south-east London. As it pertains to yesterday’s piranhas piece, the Guardian noted, “In the historic courts, Judge…
On day 7, Banksy painted swimming piranhas on a phone box in the City of London Police “sentry” box as part of the Banksy’s London Street Zoo. He mentioned something about uplifting the people, and I do feel, in my heart of hearts, that swimming piranhas might be slightly on the menacing side, but I haven’t swam with piranhas in a bit.
Ah, its nice to have a little color talk here on the podcast. Dublin, Irelands’ ACHES is a theorist of color. He combines a multitude of ideas and styles into his work, whether graffiti, murals, painting, graphic design, all into an aesthetic that is deservedly his and one of the more unique in the street genre. When you see an ACHES, you know its him.